One of my earliest blog was “Content is king and a complete pain in the neck!”. Sad to say that coming up with compelling content is still a pain for many of my small business customers. In fact in my experience it’s the single biggest factor in NOT getting websites off the ground smoothly.
Why is this? Here are some of the reasons:
- Time – who has the time to sit down and think about something as abstract as “content”. We all have a 100 other things to do.
- Seeing the wood for the trees – small business owners are so involved in their own products and/or services that they can’t always see the important stuff from the fluff.
- Hard to be personal – boilerplate, generic text is easy but making your content personal is not only important but it can be one obstacle too far for many small business people
The solution?
- Start collecting “content” NOW! Even if you don’t have a website yet, you’ll inevitably have one soon so don’t wait to collect stuff that might be of interest to your visitors.
- Break the writers block by constructing a simple question and answer session for yourself. Start with fundamental questions such as “What do I sell?” and “Who do I sell to?” and use the answers to construct some simple answers. The answers can then be massaged into compelling content keeping the tone and personality that’s so important in making it seem genuine.
- Hire someone to help you! Whether it’s a marketing consultant (like me!), a copywriter or a PR person there are people out there who can help you cross this bridge.